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Since 1856, wheat has been traded on the floor of the Kansas City Board of Trade. In the old days, there would be a swarm of traders around the pits, shouting orders, making those crazy hand signals you've seen in the movies, but that will end later this summer.

Parent company CME Group (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) announced on Monday that it will move all wheat trading to Chicago.

Joe Barker buys and sells contracts on the exchange for hard red winter wheat, the kind of wheat used to make bread. He's the branch manager of CHS Hedging, and his office is in the same building as the Kansas City Board of Trade. He’s just two floors above the trading pit. But Barker does almost all of his trades electronically.

“Taking care of that clerking function has really cleaned up the paperwork part of what we do, and that’s made us more efficient,” Barker says. “We can handle more customers and we can do it for lower costs, and it’s helped our customers. Their margins get better because we’re able to charge them less.”

In 2007, Barker says about 80 percent of his branch's trades were completed on the floor of the exchange. Now, it's less than 5 percent. That's the way the industry has been moving. Over the last decade, exchanges in Chicago, New York and Minneapolis have all closed or merged with larger exchanges.

In Kansas City, CME Group says June 28 will be the last day for trading wheat in-person.

Michael Braude, who was president of the board of trade from 1984 until 2000, notes that, “For 157 years, the Kansas City Board of Trade was an integral part of the community. I used to tell people when I would take them and give them a tour of the floor that it was the place in Kansas City where more money changed hands than any place else."

Now, that money flows from computer to computer in nanoseconds.

Jeremy Bernfeld is a reporter with Harvest Public Media.

Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas is happy to admit he's a tech geek. The musician, producer, philanthropist now has the title Director of Creative Innovation at the chipmaker Intel.

This week, we are talking to notable folks in the tech world about what could be the next digital frontier -- not the Internet of webpages, but the Internet of things, of interconnected objects.  We caught up with Will.i.am at the recent MacWorld/iWorld conference in San Francisco to get a sense of his creative process and ask him if there's any truth to reports of him moving out of music to learn coding -- writing software with computer languages.

On his future career path:

"I'm not going to quit music, I'm going to continue to make music. But I want to code because I would like to contribute to how music is experienced, and the way to do that is through coding."

On the Internet of things:

"Everywhere that we go in the world, the things that we come across aren't intelligent. Like this wall that I'm looking at, it's just separating the room from the other side. In actuality, that wall should be intelligent. Nobody thinks of it like that. That's why when you go into a house, you need to put a TV on it, instead of the wall being the display system. I think what's going to come is the Internet of things...The next ten years is nuts. That's why I want to code."

To hear Will.i.am share his thoughts on how technology will influence music and other everyday experiences, click on the audio player above. And listen to our previous interview with Will.i.am where he discusses his work to bring better science and technology education to U.S. schools.

This final note today, ripped from my Twitter timeline. We learned this morning former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's in talks for book contract.

So Twitter being Twitter, there was a flood of possible titles for what actually could turn out to be a pretty good read. "Crime and No Punishment" was one. "Midnight in the Garden of Goldman and Evil." "Saving Giant Privates."

My favorite, from Ben Smith at Politico:

The World According to TARP #geithnerbooktitles

— Ben White (@morningmoneyben) February 6, 2013
Send us yours. Comment below or tweet us @MarketplaceAPM. You can get me at @kairyssdal.

Samsung’s been in the headlines this year, in part, because of its epic clash with Apple. The two have been duking it out for the number one spot in smart phones. 

But despite the fact that Samsung builds the “Galaxy,” one of the world’s most popular smartphones, not a lot is known about the company in Silicon Valley. That’s because most of its brain power -- its research and development -- is based in its homeland Korea.

The comany hopes to change that. It's building a 1.1 milion square foot "R&D Center" and dedicating $100 million to fund emerging technologies. 

"Being in Silicon Valley is really critical because this is the epicenter of disruptive forces," said Young Sohn, the company's chief strategy officer. 

Silicon Valley attracts tech talent from around the world and Sohn says tapping into that, will determine the company’s success.

Mark Cannice, a professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at the University of San Francisco, thinks Samsung is making a smart move by starting a venture capital fund in the Valley. 

"If you think about fashion New York comes to mind, if you think about movies, Hollywood of course and if you think about innovation, you think about Silicon Valley," says Cannice.

He adds that Samsung is making a statement. That despite its varied businesses -- it builds everything from ships to office buildings -- it plans to be a leader in technology.

Wreckage believed to be from the 2011 Japanese tsunami is washing up thousands of miles away in Alaska. The debris isn't just unsightly — it poses environmental worries for the landscape and animals. One conservationist says the problem may be worse than the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

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Wreckage believed to be from the 2011 Japanese tsunami is washing up thousands of miles away in Alaska. The debris isn't just unsightly — it poses environmental worries for the landscape and animals. One conservationist says the problem may be worse than the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

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Owners of 3-D printers can create all sorts of imaginative items — cups, tools, jewelry. All they need is a design and the printer. But now some gun parts are being produced with this technology, alarming some in the burgeoning 3-D printing industry.

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With no government ties, Bitcoin is used to buy everything from blogging services to Brooklyn-made cupcakes. Theoretically, millions of dollars are being kept in the digital currency. And it's increasingly being used by specialized websites to offer online gambling. But is Bitcoin gambling legal?

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With the highest unemployment rate in the U.S. and a mountain of debt, the island is facing a declining population. But those who stay insist they're there for the long haul.

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Small, local breweries are trendy, but in many places, starting one can involve a lot of red tape, thanks in part to Prohibition-era liquor laws. New Hampshire is the first state to try to change that. But is the "nano" model really sustainable?

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We used to have three bona fide dynasties: the Yankees in baseball, the Celtics and Lakers in basketball, and the Cowboys in football. We even had dynasties in college sports. But no more. Commentator Frank Deford says our dynasties are melting as fast as the Arctic ice cap.

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The ordeal was caught by a security camera, and the owner of the car received an apology from the city.

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The Justice Department says it could seek more than $5 billion in damages from the nation's biggest credit ratings company. Critics of the agencies say the firms have for decades built their business on revenue from the Wall Street firms they are rating, instead of being a resource for investors.

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The survey also reveals a geographic split, suggesting "cultural factors" are very much a part of the gun debate. Only 12 Northeastern lawmakers said they owned guns, while 77 Southerners said the same.

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The attack at a Black Sea resort town last July killed five Israeli tourists and one Bulgarian citizen. In response, the White House called Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, a "real and growing threat not only to Europe, but to the rest of the world."

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You've heard of the war on women, the war on religion, and more recently even the war on the Second Amendment. Washington is full of so-called wars. But a war on Wi-Fi?

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The attack at a Black Sea resort town last July killed five Israeli tourists and one Bulgarian citizen. In response, the White House called Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, a "real and growing threat not only to Europe, but to the rest of the world."

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If you run a company, the great thing about going public is that you bring in other people’s money. The bad thing? You have to answer to all those people. No easy task even when times are good.

But times aren’t good for Dell. And the once-dominant personal computer maker today announced a $24 billion deal to buy out its shareholders and go private. 

Brad McCarty, the director of business development at The Next Web, isn't surprised at the move. In the last five years, Dell's stock price has tumbled. 

"People in the market only know them as 'Dude, you’re getting a Dell' guy," McCarty says, referring to an advertising campaign back when Dell was the biggest computer maker in the world. But now consumers are trading their PCs in for tablets and smartphones, and the laptop market isn't what it used to be.

But the potential new owners of Dell know there’s more to the company than PCs, says analyst Adrian O’Connell of Gartner Research. Dell is also a big player in business services: Providing servers and computers to companies and maintaining them.

"We tend to look at Dell as two companies at the moment, or, rather, we think in terms of old Dell and new Dell," he says.

And that new Dell is well-positioned in the growing field of business services, says tech consultant Tim Bajarin, president of business technology consulting firm Creative Strategies. He says computer systems are "the backbone of running any corporation. We’ve moved into a data age."

Bajarin points out that a lot of old guard computer-makers have flocked to the sector, including IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

Of course, changing a company’s focus takes time, Bajarin says. And being public means posting earnings and answering to shareholders every three months.

"By going private, it takes the quarterly monkey off their back of the shareholders demanding a quarter-by-quarter profit," he says.

Bajarin says Dell might sell off its PC business. IBM sold its personal computer business to Lenovo and its stock price has more than doubled since then.

The hostility between Iran and Egypt dates to the 1970s, and the Muslim nations remain wary of one another. However, tensions have thawed in recent months.

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On Wednesday, a group of talented young men will decide their future. College football coaches and hard core fans eagerly await their choices. It's National Signing Day, when top high school players commit to the NCAA powerhouse where they’ll suit up.

Most will announce their choices via a slowly dying office fixture, the fax machine. A big day for college sports is the biggest day of all for that antiquated technology.

A star high school football player may make a public commitment about where he’s going to college, and many do, in media interviews and on Twitter. But nothing is binding until there’s a signed letter of intent.

These top prospects are teenagers, after all, so they can change their minds. That can make for tense scenes on campus when signing day arrives.

"You have coaches. You have administrators, everybody staring at the fax machine," says Jonathan Bowling, associate athletics director at reigning champ University of Alabama. “And then you hear that first ring and everybody freezes.”

At Alabama and other big-time football programs, staffers prep their faxes like NASA engineers before launch. Technicians are called, toner is refreshed, test faxes sent. Other campus offices are given stern warnings not to send any faxes during signing day. Bowling says the ultimate buzzkill is when a fax turns out to be spam for cheap Caribbean vacations or insurance.

Fans hang on every page too. Many schools offer live web feeds of their fax machine. Alabama got clicks and controversy a while back when it spiced up its fax web stream by having comely, short-skirted women grab the pages. That stopped, but fans around the country still watch, eager to see which top players their school signs.

The fax is the standard because sending letters of intent by mail is far too slow for nervous coaches. The NCAA does allow recruits to scan and e-mail their letters, but few do.

Michael Bertsch of Notre Dame’s athletic department could only think of one occasion where e-mail came into play. Bad weather had knocked out fax lines for some Texas players signing up with the Fighting Irish. The humble fax prevails over e-mail in part because, unlike an e-mail attachment, the tangibility of a signed piece of paper is something that players, coaches and fans can all hang onto.

Texas A&M professor Jonathan Coopersmith is amused by the fax’s star turn in college football. He’s a historian of the fax machine, among other communication technologies. He thinks the novelty of faxing makes a huge moment in players’ lives more special in a way that clicking send on an e-mail can’t. He says that going through the motions of signing and sending a fax, something most young players have never done, “makes it a more solemn, more serious, more memorable event.”

But the shining signing moment for the fax machine doesn’t last long. The whir of faxes printing dies down in the afternoon. Fax web cams go dark as fans head to comment sections and social to dissect signings and fight about which school won the year’s recruitment war.

“For about a 24-hour period, it’s all eyes on the fax machine,” says Mike Farrell, who oversees recruiting coverage for the college sports site Rivals. “Come Thursday, it’s just another piece of office equipment.”

Kai Ryssdal: Tomorrow's a very big day in the lives of some very big young men. Wednesday is National Signing Day, when top high school football players commit to the NCAA institution they've chosen to play for next year.

Hardcore college football fans eagerly await their choices, which makes signing day the last gasp of that slowly dying office fixture: the fax machine.

Marketplace's Mark Garrison explains.

Mark Garrison: Star high school player O.J. Howard says he’s going to play for reigning champion Alabama, but it’s not official until he signs a letter of intent. Top recruits like him are teenagers afterall, and they could change their minds. That makes for tense scenes tomorrow morning on campus.

Jonathan Bowling: You have coaches. You have administrators, everybody staring at the fax machine. And then you hear that first ring and everybody freezes.

Jonathan Bowling is University of Alabama’s Associate Athletics Director. The ultimate buzzkill is when it turns out to be a spam fax for Caribbean vacations. Like other schools, they’re prepping their machine like NASA engineers before launch.

Bowling: We definitely have it looked at, make sure that the toner is filled up, make sure that we have a new ream of paper in there.

Fans hang on every page too. Many schools offer live web feeds of their fax machine. Alabama got clicks and controversy a while back when it spiced up its fax web stream by having comely, short-skirted women grab the pages.

The NCAA does allow recruits to scan and e-mail their letters, but few do. The fax is still king.

Jonathan Coopersmith: Oh, I love it. I love it.

Jonathan Coopersmith is a Texas A&M historian of the fax machine, among other things. For this huge moment in players’ lives, the novelty of faxing makes it special.

Coopersmith: They have to go back to this old technology. I’ve gotta to sign this paper and I have to put it in the machine. Bringing it back makes it a more solemn, more serious, more memorable event.

And with few exceptions, one of the last big moments for the fax machine. In New York, I'm Mark Garrison, for Marketplace.